University of Delaware President Dennis Assanis projected optimism at a semi-annual public meeting with the Board of Trustees on Tuesday, describing the university-wide shift to online learning as a success story and looking ahead to the bright light of the spring 2021 semester after the long dark tunnel that was the fall of 2020.
âThis has been an unusual year â unprecedented, really, in our 275-year history,â he said. âAnd obviously an unusual semester, but we made it all the way to the end.â
Assanis commended the work of staff and students to facilitate the shift to remote learning of more than 4,000 classes. Many professors have used this semester as an opportunity to experiment with new instructional models, he said, claiming that these new models often empower a degree of student success on par with or even exceeding in-person learning.